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Jesse,
- You're right. I used the wrong word. I should have said "pre-specified."

You are once again using a new term with the same meaning in the hope that it will magically fix your argument, just as you did with all those terms you used when you meant "soul". Substituting "pre-specified" for "pre-selected" does not address JesseCuster's point.

__________________"You got to use your brain." - McKinley Morganfield

"The poor mystic homeopaths feel like petted house-cats thrown at high flood on the breaking ice." - Leon Trotsky

Jesse,
- You're right. I used the wrong word. I should have said "pre-specified."

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

__________________"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." Charles Bukowski
"Most good ideas don't work." Jabba
"Se due argomenti sembrano altrettanto convincenti, il meno sarcastico è probabilmente corretto." Jabba's Razor

- Sure. But, not being able to express an hypothesis effectively doesn't mean that there is no true principle underlying, and provoking, the attempt.

We know what's provoking your attempt. You had an epiphany at age 14. You are very emotionally attached to the idea that you have an immortal soul. You're also emotionally attached to the notion that you can prove it to be true via mathematics. You told us all this, remember?

Now in the general case and the abstract sense we must logically disconnect the veracity of a proposition from ineptitude in expressing it. How many innocent people go to jail because their lawyers were ineffective? And it took Einstein two tries to get to a comprehensive theory of relativity. So when I say that's not the problem here, it's not because I disagree with the statement above. Remember, I identified it as a characteristic of your argument that you beg agreement on an abstract question that has an obviously right answer, then beg the question that your situation is identical to the abstract question. The problem with your argument is not that it's merely an ineffective presentation of an otherwise true principle; it's that your argument is deeply wrong at a fundamental level. The difficulty you're having is from your unsuccessful efforts to hide those errors, not from some arduous search for truth.

First, none of your key principles are true. I have outlined a dozen or so things that your argument gets very wrong. Each of these is individually fatal. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is one of them, but only one of them. In an effort to be friendly, I made a convenient list of them to which you have been several times directed. These are simple and glaring errors, Jabba, not things you can handwave away as elusive nuances that you'll one day get right. They're not something you can gloss over with a gift of gab that you beg your allegedly unimaginative and "unfriendly" opponents to accept uncritically.

Second, your expressions have the effect of obscuring the point over time, not clarifying it. Your critics very quickly come to the nugget of your argument on each point you try to make. After that arrival is when you allege general confusion, upset the apple-cart, and insist on a whole new barrage of newly ambiguous language. Your efforts purported to elucidate almost always aim instead to re-obfuscate. You're just prolonging a debate you've all but admitted was over long ago. After five years of go-nowhere tap-dancing, it's fairly clear in this case that the best explanation is that the underlying hypothesis is wrong -- no mathematical proof exists for the precept of an immortal soul.

You are right on one count, though. Your argument is inappropriate toward the claim. There may indeed be an immortal soul, but a Bayesian inference -- even a properly concocted one -- is not the way to go about looking for it.

Originally Posted by Jabba

Unfortunately, I now think that I was wrong about the Bayesian formulas accounting for the Sharpshooter fallacy...
Not to worry -- I might change my mind again

Since you have a history of reneging on your concessions, I don't believe this statement you just made. Which is to say, I believe you are admitting error here and now only to defuse your critics in the short term. As you hint, I'm sure we'll be seeing the "special snowflake" argument again as soon as the heat has died down. These tantalizing non-concession concessions are part of what makes this thread so long and repetitive. Will this be the day you admit an error that stays admitted?

Originally Posted by Jabba

You're right. I used the wrong word. I should have said "pre-specified."

No, that doesn't fix the argument. You're just playing the word games that have come to typify this debate. You don't seem to understand why the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a fallacy. I renew my suggestion that you attempt to describe it here in your own words and explain why it's a fallacy.

It's the concept here that's broken, not what thesaurus entry you use to express it. The wrongness of the concept is that you establish the criteria for data significance only after you have data in hand. That defeats any attempt to reason about the statistical probability of that significance.

The royal flush is a winning hand in poker only because we have pre-specified it before dealing the cards. That's the only reason being dealt one has such significance in the game, as opposed to any other combination of five cards -- all of which have an equal probability of being dealt.

You consider the seven billion people that currently exist, and somehow you are magically able to say this what was supposed to exist here and now, and therefore that the odds of them doing so are astronomically small because there were infinite possibilities to start with. That is an identical exercise to being dealt five random cards, declaring -- after looking at your random assortment -- that you've been dealt a Jabbanese Sampler, insisting that it's a new winning poker hand, and departing the table with everyone else's chips. Pre-specification of the outcome is the sine qua non of this sort of reasoning, Jabba. You don't get to beg your critics pretty-please to ignore it so that you can brag about winning all their chips.

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

Too bad you only have one hole, your existence. There is no grouping to consider in this case.

__________________"Oh god...What have you done, zooterkin? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?!?!" - Cleon

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

Oh, for the love of Anne Hathaway's Oscar ...

The target in this hypothetical was pre-defined. It was "a grouping of shots within a very small distance of each other." The only thing you didn't do was define how close the shots had to be to each other, and it should have been defined for this to be a proper test of marksmanship. But, as we could probably get agreement as to that measurement, we can elide it (so long as the results are way inside or way outside what we might reasonably agree on).

So, you predefined the expected outcome before a single shot was fired. It had to be a "close grouping." Where it was on the side of the barn doesn't matter.

In the same way, your existence is a possible outcome. Since it was in no way defined before you came to exist, then you have committed the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

Yeah, except that this is not what you're doing. You can't dismiss the fact that you're using a fallacy by posting an example that's not analogous to what you're doing.

You have made no effort to answer the fundamental questions about your 'theory', and are instead engaged in subterfuge and diversion. It is not much of an effort to guess why: you know that you have no argument.

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.

That's not "targetness". That's just you being a sharpshooter:
- you claim to be a sharpshooter
- you fire "at the barn" (your words)
- you hit the barn repeatedly

Congratulations! You're a sharpshooter--you hit the target you specified.

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

In this case, the barn itself is the target. That's what you pre-selected to aim at, after all. So you aimed at and shot at the barn. You hit the barn.

You're trying to pretend you were actually aiming at that small grouping of hit shots. But you didn't specify or pre-select that before firing. So there's nothing special about that special grouping.

What I think you're trying to say is that you shot at the barn and, upon looking at where the shots landed, you saw that you hit a knothole in a board in the barn and then excitedly claim that the knothole was a surprise but it was so meaningful! What are the odds of hitting that knothole from way over where you were standing? It's extremely low, I'm sure. But then you continue to say that the knothole must be special; it's special because you're assigning 'specialness' to it after you hit it. Not before you hit it.

THAT'S the difference that everyone and the dog is trying to get you to figure out. You shot wildly, not aiming at anything at all and then express excitement that you hit... something. This something that you hit you then assign great meaning and significance to it and try to apply Bayes and other well mis-understood (by you) ideas of probability to the random shot, further proclaiming how amazing the shot was.

No, no, no. The point everyone is making is that you have to specify the knothole BEFORE shooting at it. Then, if you hit it, you can be justified in concluding that you're a very good shot.

No, it doesn't. You see, you'd say the exact same thing no matter what you hit. You will do this because you did NOT state what the target was before you fired.

If you fired randomly and hit the left hand, lower window pane, you'd then dance about joyously proclaiming that the window pane was a hugely unlikely target to hit and it's quite meaningful that you hit it. Or if you fired randomly and hit the pulley at the barn peak (used to haul hay up to the hayloft, whatever it's called), you'd have then tried to calculate what the odds are for a person to aim and hit the pulley, and THAT would have been your unique, special target; you'd claim that it was unlikely but only when compared to someone actually using the pulley as a point of aim.

Is this a little more clear about the mistake you're making?

And this is only ONE of the dozen-ish problems your theory has.

Even if it were granted that we would ignore this problem, you still have a long slog uphill in trying to overcome the rest.

And finally, to address your use of the new term "targetness". It's another essentially meaningless term you're using to continue to obfuscate the points you're trying to make. It's a dishonest, wishy-washy term, just like the term 'god.' It's not only irritating but obvious; just as your switch from "target" to "pre-selection" is obvious and dishonest.

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...

Like hell you didn't. Your tight grouping demonstrates precision but not necessarily accuracy. Because you didn't call your target, for all we know you were actually aiming at that tin can lid two yards to the left of hole.

Quote:

- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

You claim to be trained in statistcs; if you are, I'd expect you know the difference between accuracy and precision and not make up nonsense terms like "targetness".

Your analogy fails totally.

__________________Chicken is a vegetable-James May, vegetarianA target doesn't need to be preselected-Jabba

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.
- I didn't need to pre-specify my target...
- And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.
- If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

And that analogy is to what? No-one's existence, including yours, is analogous to a pattern of shots, we are all just single, random, shots.

JayUtah guessed right, you are trying the "special snowflake" argument again. But you are not a special snowflake, Jabba. You are just a snowflake like any other.

__________________"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett

Changing the phrase from "pre-selected" to "pre-specified" in no way addresses my point.

What's the difference between a pre-selected target and a pre-specified target?

Jesse,
- Pre-specified means that you have told someone, or have otherwise indicated your selection, prior to shooting. I'm saying that there are ways for others to know what your target was, without be told.

__________________"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." Charles Bukowski
"Most good ideas don't work." Jabba
"Se due argomenti sembrano altrettanto convincenti, il meno sarcastico è probabilmente corretto." Jabba's Razor

- Try this.
- You and I move about 200 yards from a barn in Texas. I take my old M-14 with me, tell you that I'm a sharpshooter, and start firing away at the barn. We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.

There are several things wrong with this analogy.

First of all, even if your shots all ended up close together, we don't know that you actually hit what you were aiming at because you never said where you intended to hit. Because you never specified your target, we can't actually say that you hit your intended target because we have no idea what the intended target was.

There's plenty of situations where you can repeatedly hit the same location without actually being a good shot or without intending to hit that actual location. I could get a piece of artillery, aim it in some random direction and fire a bunch of shells which would all land in the same spot. It would be foolish of me however to then declare that I'm a crack shot with artillery because I can get all my shells to hit the same location. Because I never actually specified where I was aiming for and because I actually had no idea where the shells were going to land, I can't claim after the fact that I successfully repeatedly hit my target because all my shots landed in the same spot. A situation where a bunch of things hit the same location does not mean that it was the result of skill or intention.

The other major problem with your analogy is that you only have one sense of self. This is why the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the correct description for this aspect of your argument. Only one shot has been fired and it happened to hit you (assuming for the same of argument that there are actually such things as potential selves and one ended up in your body). In order for your analogy to actually hold true, it would imply that there were a whole bunch of potential Jabba selves and that they all happened to land in your body when you were born. Then you might be able to declare that what happened was not random chance, but clearly the result of some sort of guidance or intelligence or whatever it is you wish to argue. But that isn't what happened. You have exactly one sense of self which is the equivalent of taking a single shot at your barn.

The correct analogy is that you have taken one shot at your barn, didn't declare beforehand where you actually intended for your shot to hit, but then declared afterward that because the barn is huge and the bullethole is tiny, the chances of hitting whatever spot on the barn you happened to hit, was so unlikely, that it must be the result of you being a crack shot with a rifle, instead of the more obvious conclusion that anyone can fire a gun at a barn and it will make a tiny bullethole somewhere in the barn.

- Pre-specified means that you have told someone, or have otherwise indicated your selection, prior to shooting. I'm saying that there are ways for others to know what your target was, without be told.

Such as?

__________________"You got to use your brain." - McKinley Morganfield

"The poor mystic homeopaths feel like petted house-cats thrown at high flood on the breaking ice." - Leon Trotsky

Pre-specified means that you have told someone, or have otherwise indicated your selection, prior to shooting. I'm saying that there are ways for others to know what your target was, without be told.

No. For the purposes of determining how to evaluate the significance of the data in your model, "telling someone else" or "others knowing about it" has nothing to do with it. Please stop just making stuff up.

Jesse,
- Pre-specified means that you have told someone, or have otherwise indicated your selection, prior to shooting. I'm saying that there are ways for others to know what your target was, without be told.

Stop playing with the analogy and address the actual argument you've made that is fallacious, Jabba.

You're calculating odds based on numbers pulled out of thin air. You're assuming that there are potential souls. You have not justified any of these things. In fact you've expended a lot of time and energy at _not_ justifying them.

First of all, even if your shots all ended up close together, we don't know that you actually hit what you were aiming at because you never said where you intended to hit. Because you never specified your target, we can't actually say that you hit your intended target because we have no idea what the intended target was...

Jesse,
- There are degrees of "targetness."
- I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue. I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.
- That being the case, you might not know where exactly I was shooting, but you'd have a pretty good guess. There was a degree of targetness.

__________________"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." Charles Bukowski
"Most good ideas don't work." Jabba
"Se due argomenti sembrano altrettanto convincenti, il meno sarcastico è probabilmente corretto." Jabba's Razor

Whether or not you find yourself "ordinary" with respect to others of your kind, I say you should be extremely surprised that you, specifically, find yourself, in particular, among the chosen, against the giganogargantuan odds that were stacked against you...

Jesse,
- There are degrees of "targetness."
- I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue. I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.
- That being the case, you might not know where exactly I was shooting, but you'd have a pretty good guess. There was a degree of targetness.

I thought you were going to respond to JayUtah? Surely his points should be easy for you to address?

Jesse,
- There are degrees of "targetness."
- I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue. I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.
- That being the case, you might not know where exactly I was shooting, but you'd have a pretty good guess. There was a degree of targetness.

Oh, stop it already.

There's no such thing as "targetness". Something is either a target or it isn't. You choose to aim at something or you do not. You may choose more than one target, of course.

But face it: you yourself did not know what the target was until after the shot. Nobody did. You're just claiming how special it was after the fact. It looks like with this current post, you're claiming YOU knew the target before shooting, but you didn't.

Jesse,
- There are degrees of "targetness."
- I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue. I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.
- That being the case, you might not know where exactly I was shooting, but you'd have a pretty good guess. There was a degree of targetness.

But the barn in question doesn't have splotches of paint. It has one single hole you simply declared as being special. Your analogy has nothing to do with your actual argument.

__________________"Oh god...What have you done, zooterkin? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?!?!" - Cleon

Whether or not you find yourself "ordinary" with respect to others of your kind, I say you should be extremely surprised that you, specifically, find yourself, in particular, among the chosen, against the giganogargantuan odds that were stacked against you...

I don't believe that sequence would surprise you at all. Nor should it. It means nothing, signifies nothing.

Nor is your analogy equivalent to Jabba's (subjective) formula. You're just once again defaulting to an objective viewpoint which is not relevant to Jabba's formula. In your objectively oriented analogy, a random sequence of cards came off a deck, signifying nothing.

I'll tell you what would surprise you, if you're not a P-zombie. And even if you are a P-zombie, you would be compelled to simulate surprise...

Your random sequence of cards turns out to be a code which, when keyed into cyberspace, invokes a Genie who materializes and grants you one wish. The Genie marvels at your luck, explaining that there is a different card sequence code corresponding to every person on the planet. But a valid code can only invoke the Genie if the code is specifically communicated to another person.

And you would owe it all to me, for triggering you to post that particular sequence.

The formula is valid in the subjective sense to which it is tailored. The formula does not address an observation that is sigfnificant to everyone on the planet. The formula addresses an observation that is significant to the user only.

I would not suggest that any solution should be made available to the public. Doing so might cause millions of suicides, giving rise to a compulsion to designate a scapegoat.

If I were to attempt a possible solution, I might rely on classical field theory rather than the "Self".

I might even attempt multiple solutions, if I were gonna. But I'm not gonna.

- I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue. I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.

But you never specified that you were aiming at a splotch of paint. That's the whole point of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. You're declaring after the fact that what you hit was your target.

If you wanted to prove that you were a good shot, you'd tell me that you were going to shoot a splotch of paint on the barn. If you then took several shots which all hit or came close to the splotch of paint, then I'd agree that you were indeed a good shot.

However, that's not what you're doing. What you're doing is declaring that you're a great shot. You're then taking aim at the barn and firing off several shots without declaring where on the barn you're actually trying to hit. You're then declaring after the fact that where the bullets hit the barn was where you were aiming at.

No matter how you slice and dice it, you are repeatedly making the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. It sounds like you're just rewording the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in various ways in the hope that people will not notice that you're actually making the fallacy.

Quote:

That being the case, you might not know where exactly I was shooting, but you'd have a pretty good guess. There was a degree of targetness.

Like I said in my previous post, I have no idea what "degree of targetness" means. You're going to have to explain what that actually means. I suspect it means nothing at all.

If you wanted to prove that you were a good shot and could reliably hit a target on your barn, why would you do it in such a way that the person you're trying to prove your shooting skills at has to try and make a "pretty good guess" after the fact that what you hit was what you were aiming at? Surely you'd either put an actual target on the barn to make it obvious what you're aiming at or simply declare before you shoot exactly where on the barn you're trying to hit.

This is all beside the point however. The main problem with your analogy is that you're not actually firing off several shots which all hit the barn in roughly the same place, allowing people to make a "pretty good guess" that area of the barn where the bulletholes are clustered was what you were aiming at and therefore you actually hit your target, (which wasn't really a target at all, just a random area of the side of the barn, which you are declaring after the fact was the target you were aiming at).

No, what you've done is fired exactly one shot, which hit a random spot on the side of the barn. Remember, that according to this analogy, you're the target and the bullet is a "potential self" that hit you. There is no cluster of bullet holes close together that allow people to make a "pretty good guess" that the area of the barn that were aiming at. Instead, there is simply one bullet hole in a random area of the barn and you're trying to use dodgy mathematics to prove that you must be a crack shot because the barn is huge and the chances of randomly hitting that particular spot on the barn is tiny, therefore you mustn't have simply taken a wild shot at the barn with your rifle, you must have taken exact aim at that particular spot and hit it because of how awesome a shot you are.

Your debating tactic simply isn't going to work. You can't just keep repeating the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, rewording it in various ways, making up your own oddball meaningless terminology ("degrees of targetness" or "pre-specified targets vs. pre-selected targets") and hope that no-one will notice that you're just repeating the same fallacious argument over and over and over and over....

Jesse,
- There are degrees of "targetness."
- I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue. I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.

And that analogy is to what? No-one's existence, including yours, is analogous to a shot group centered around a splotch of paint, we are all just single, random, shots.

You are not a special snowflake, Jabba. You are just a snowflake like any other. Even if there was such a thing as a scale of 'targetness' your score on that scale would still be a big fat zero.

__________________"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett

Jesse,
- There are degrees of "targetness."
- I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue. I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.
- That being the case, you might not know where exactly I was shooting, but you'd have a pretty good guess. There was a degree of targetness.

Jabba,
- If someone else existed in your place, and advanced the same argument for immortality as you are advancing, would that argument be valid?

__________________"You got to use your brain." - McKinley Morganfield

"The poor mystic homeopaths feel like petted house-cats thrown at high flood on the breaking ice." - Leon Trotsky

- I'm currently trying to focus on the sharpshooter issue, so I'll go back to the following:

Originally Posted by Jabba

Jesse,
- Pre-specified means that you have told someone, or have otherwise indicated your selection, prior to shooting. I'm saying that there are ways for others to know what your target was, without be told.

Originally Posted by JayUtah

No. For the purposes of determining how to evaluate the significance of the data in your model, "telling someone else" or "others knowing about it" has nothing to do with it. Please stop just making stuff up.

Jay,
- Sure it does. That way we know what the shooter is shooting at, and we can give him a score accordingly. I must not understand your objection...

__________________"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." Charles Bukowski
"Most good ideas don't work." Jabba
"Se due argomenti sembrano altrettanto convincenti, il meno sarcastico è probabilmente corretto." Jabba's Razor

No. "Targetness" is just your latest made-up word that magically seems to save you from the glaring fallacy you're committing. You've been asked to show how you determine the significance of data in your model, and you can't get past the notion that the supposedly miraculous significance lies simply in its having arisen.

Quote:

I shouldn't have said that the shot group centered around a small hole on the side of the barn -- that confused the issue.

Yes, your entire analogy tried to obfuscate the very simple issue that the significance of data in your model is decided when you see the data, not before.

Quote:

I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.

Cool story, bro. It has nothing to do with your data-selection methods, which are the topic we're discussing. As I said, posing a hypothetical problem that has an obviously correct solution doesn't make it appropriate to your claim. You are begging the question that analogies in which the target is pre-selected correspond to your statistical model for immortality, in which the target is not pre-selected.

We walk back to the barn and find a tiny shot group centered around a small hole in the barn wall.

Your analogies relate less and less to your argument the more you tell them. While it might be fun to tell stories about the many ways to shoot at a barn, the eponymous one that illustrates the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is the one that relates to your data-sampling error, and therefore the only one we should be discussing. Telling different stories doesn't fix your error. It does, however, aim to distract the people who are trying to question your actual argument, and who have helpfully created a digest of your major errors that you seem to be assiduously avoiding. Can you please kindly let us know when you'll be returning to your proof of immortality?

Quote:

I didn't need to pre-specify my target...

Then what's the "small hole" for in the story? Either that was your target, and it existed prior to you shooting at it, or it wasn't your target and the clustering around it is an accident. By all means argue from analogy if you wish, but please try to make some sense.

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And, in this case, we'd have a high degree of targetness.

You don't define "targetness" -- you just made up yet another new word to conceal the question you're constantly trying to beg. We glean from context that you intend it to mean some sort of correlation.

Yes, in the classic exercise of target shooting, where the target exists prior to the shots being fired, a skilled shooter will cluster his shots such that a spatial correlation exists. There are mathematical methods for determining the centroid of such data points, and their central tendency. As others have noted, that correlation is independent of whether any shots hit a predetermined target point. "Targetness" by this measure is therefore meaningless. You can remain impressed by the marksman's consistency if you want, but you don't get to move the ten-ring to coincide with the shot grouping and then claim he's a wonderful marksman, especially if his shot-grouping is above the silhouette's shoulder.

But more importantly, if you intend this analogy to refer to your sample of seven billion living people, there's no "grouping" in the data. All you can tell me about what those folks have in common is that they were somehow selected. And conversely, all you can tell me about the infinite number of "potential people" waiting in the wings is that they weren't selected. That's still the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. You're walking up to the barn, drawing a circle around a subset of randomly spaced bullet holes, and telling me that your special "grouping" is whatever is in the circle you drew.

As I've said before, drawing analogies that have obviously correct answers begs the question that they accurately illustrate your argument -- they never do. Correlation among the data is not an important factor in the argument you're trying to make, and no such correlation exists in your data anyway. For the umpteenth time, the number of data points you post-select has nothing to do with the error of post-selecting them.

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If my shot group wasn't all that small, we'd have a lower degree of targetness.

If you were intending to create a small shot grouping, then the first shot becomes the pre-selected target for the following shots -- just like when playing craps. If there was no such intent, then the grouping was accidental and nothing can be reliably inferred from it despite how marvelous you may think it is. Rolling a long sequence of fives on the dice may be truly improbable, but you don't get to define that as a new way to win at craps just for having done something improbable.

I should have said that it centered around a splotch of paint (or something similar) on the side of the barn.

That's not what's wrong with the story. Call it a small hole, a splotch of paint, a spot of pigeon crap, or a pineknot -- the problem is how you think it relates to your data grouping. Either you saw it ahead of time and were trying to hit it, in which case you preselected it before firing the shots, or you didn't see it and weren't aiming at it, in which case you'll just have cherry-picked some curious feature on the barn (from among all such features distributed over the barn wall) based on its postselected proximity to your bullet holes. There's no functional difference between "drawing a circle" and "picking the curious feature nearest the bullet hole(s)" as far as the fallacy goes.

You clearly don't understand the error you're making. Again I renew my suggestion that you try to explain to the esteemed audience here what you think the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is and what makes it a fallacy. Perhaps in doing so you'll see what all your critics are trying to show you. The error you're making is not some nuanced obscurity; it's a simple, glaring error that you can't simply talk circles around and make go away.

That way we know what the shooter is shooting at, and we can give him a score accordingly.

The crux of the fallacy is when the significance of the data is determined, not whether that significance is communicated to someone else. You would do better to stop torturing analogies and look at your argument instead. You're conflating problems that arise only in your analogies, not in your argument.

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I must not understand your objection...

Which is why I've asked you several times to attempt to explain what you think the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is and why it's a fallacy.

Your argument is clearly in error there, whether you understand the relevant fallacy or not. Your critics don't need your agreement or understanding in order to locate the errors in your proof. They exist whether you acknowledge them or not.

The problem with your approach is that you've wrongly identified the Texas sharpshooter fallacy as the only real problem with your proof. You've said that if you can just "get past" it, the rest of your proof just falls into place. That's not true. I've identified roughly a dozen problems with your proof, each of which is individually fatal to your claim, and none of which goes away magically by your sidestepping the one issue you're currently focused on. Those need attention too, if you want to advertise that your proof is so very close to working.

Since you've used this ever-narrowing focus in the past to bog down the debate and keep your other errors from being discussed, your critics rightly dismiss your assessment of the strength of your proof "but for" the issue of post-selected data. Can you please at least write one or two sentences for each of the previously identified fatal flaws indicating how you plan to address them should the argument eventually move forward?